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Brooklyn Bridge was a half-hour Comedy-Drama that aired from September 1991 until August 1993 on CBS.
Brooklyn, New York was the setting for this nostalgic series. The focus of the show was 14 year old Alan Silver ( Danny Gerard), a middle-class Jewish youngster growing up in a time when the beloved Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, candy was a penny at Sid Elgart's neighborhood candy store, doctors made housecalls and street crime was virtually non-existant.
Alan lived in an apartment house with his parents, Postal-worker George ( Peter Friedman), and working mom Phyllis ( Amy Aquino), and his kid brother Nathaniel ( Matthew Louis Siegel). Living in the same building were Alan's maternal Grandparents, Jules and Sophie Berger (Louis Zorich, Marion Ross) Sophie, the un-questioned matriarch of the family was a loving, but strong willed woman whose word was almost always law to her family. Although she was perfectly at home with her Grandson's multi-ethnic friends-Nicholas, Benny, and Warren (Adam Lavorgna, Jake Jundef, Aeryk Egan), Sophia found it difficult to accept Kate Monahan ( Jenny Lewis), the Catholic girl he was dating.
For Creator/Producer Gary David Goldberg, who had also created the long-running Family Ties, this series was a semi-autobiographical labor of love. He had grown up in Brooklyn in the 1950's and his fond rememberences of those years provided the framework on which Brooklyn Bridge was built-everything from the radio coverage of Dodger baseball games ( voiced by longtime Dodger announcer Vince Scully), to the vintage Rock 'N' Roll songs used in the background to set the mood.
The show was fondly received by critics for combining strong writting and performances ( Marion Ross's work as Sophie was a particular critical favorite), with an unerring sense of period detail. The show won several awards during it's 2 year run from sources as deverse as the American Society Of Cinematographers, The Golden Globes, The Human Family Educational and Culteral Institute, and The Viewers For Quality Television Awards, but the audience support was a little harder to come by. A devoted fan base absolutely adored the show, but Brooklyn Bridge was never able to attract the wide audience of more mainstream nostalgic fare like Happy Days and The Wonder Years.
The show ended it's run in August of 1993, but those still devoted fans have been able to catch the occasional rerun in syndication.
The Theme Song " Just Over The Brooklyn Bridge"
A world of its own,
The streets where we played--
The friends on every corner
Were the best we ever made.
The backyards and the schoolyards
And the trees that watched us grow;
The days in life when dinner time
Was all you had to know.
Whenever I think of yesterday
I close my eyes and see
That place just over the Brooklyn Bridge,
That'll always be home to me,
That'll always be home to me.
Performed by Art Garfunkel
A Review From The New York Times
TV WEEKEND; Family Life in '56 Brooklyn
By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: September 20, 1991
WRITING will out. It's as simple as that. As the new television season unfolds, the vast bulk of series are content to be formula-driven concepts, put together by committees of vice presidents and researchers. A wedding possibility here, some cute teen-agers there, and you pray for a hit. Only very occasionally is a distinctive voice allowed to be heard above the numbing prattle, and one can be heard tonight at 8 in the special hourlong premiere of "Brooklyn Bridge." It belongs to Gary David Goldberg.
Best known as the creator of the long-running "Family Ties" and the more recent "American Dreamer," Mr. Goldberg has decided to return to the Brooklyn of his youth for a warm-hearted look at a family and community that he clearly cherished. The year is 1956, the neighborhood Bensonhurst. For many young viewers, I suspect, it might just as well be the 19th century. With a theme song performed by Art Garfunkel, accompanied on the piano by Marvin Hamlisch, "Brooklyn Bridge" is about a time gone by. A sort of "Wonder Years" crossed with "The Goldbergs," it can be shamelessly sentimental and, at least in this sensitively crafted introduction written and directed by Mr. Goldberg, thoroughly captivating.
The Berger and Silver families live in the same apartment building, a modest dwelling but modern enough to have a garbage incinerator chute on each floor. Tenements are receding into the past; the mass exodus to suburbia is a decade away. Sophie Berger (Marion Ross) is the family matriarch, fussing with meals for her husband, Jules (Louis Zorich), and her two grandchildren, 14-year-old Allan (Danny Gerard) and 9-year-old Nathaniel (Matthew Siegel). Sophie's daughter, Phyllis (Amy Aquino), and her husband, George Silver (Peter Friedman), a post-office employee, live in an apartment upstairs. Nothing goes on in the building that Sophie doesn't know about.
Nothing much, and yet everything, happens in "Brooklyn Bridge." Allan torments his kid brother with the news that he, like everyone else, will die some day. A weeping Nathaniel is assured by Sophie that he is never going to die. One of her mah-jongg partners adds for good measure, "Not if he doesn't want to." In front of school, Allan doesn't forget to kiss Nathaniel before sending him to class. Remember when siblings, as they're now called, did that as a matter of course? Both boys, of course, and all of their friends are rabid Brooklyn Dodger fans. Getting an autograph from Gil Hodges turns into a memorable experience not only for Nathaniel, but for his grandparents as well.
Alan is beginning to encounter more grown-up problems. One is his growing friendship with Katie Monahan (Jenny Lewis), the beautiful girl who attends a nearby Roman Catholic school. The Berger and Silver families are wary. Sophie swears she can hear the girl's crucifix clinking at the other end of the telephone. Alan is unfazed. Just one look at Katie and all he can hear is the Ink Spots singing "Only You." A different kind of problem has developed with his best friend, Benny (Jake Jundef), whose immature ways have become an embarrassment to his other friends. They want to kick Benny out of the gang, and Alan has to make some difficult decisions concerning friendship. Sophie warns, "There are always going to be reasons to do the wrong thing."
"Brooklyn Bridge" has its flaws. The studio sets -- the series is being filmed on a Paramount lot in Los Angeles -- are just that, studio sets, adequate but artificial. The character of Sophie is a touch too drenched in ageless wisdom. And Alan might easily turn into a pompous know-it-all. But these are minor glitches, easily adjusted. Mr. Goldberg knows the territory intimately and his affectionate tour is off to a remarkably engaging start.
A Review from Entertainment Weekly
TV Review
STRAIGHT INTO BROOKLYN
FAMILY TIES CREATOR GARY DAVID GOLDBERG SCORES AGAIN WITH HIS TENDER NEW COMEDY, BROOKLYN BRIDGE
By Ken Tucker
It really sounded as if producer-director-writer Gary David Goldberg was getting too big for his britches when details started emerging about his new show, brooklyn bridge (CBS, Fridays, 8:30-9 p.m.).This sitcom, it was said, would be a deeply personal work for the 47-year-old Goldberg, a re-creation of his early years as a brainy, baseball-loving, lower-middle-class kid in 1950s Brooklyn. With an obsessiveness that was the TV-auteur equivalent of lordly film directors ranging from Orson Welles to Michael Cimino, Goldberg was going to replicate as a stage set the actual New York apartment building he grew up in. Now, this takes a lot of time and money. It's typical for a fall TV project to complete a pilot during the preceding summer, so that a network's affiliate stations and TV critics can take a gander at it. But by August, Goldberg was lavishing such care on his production that he hadn't even finished casting the darn show, let alone filmed anything. And when Goldberg made a commercial for CBS to promote the series, it didn't feature any Brooklyn Bridge characters-it starred Gary David Goldberg, talking about how special this series was to him. All right already, Gary, you could hear America saying, but will it be special for us? CBS seemed to be courting disaster. Sure, Goldberg was the guy who created Family Ties, one of the biggest TV hits of the '80s and the show that made Michael J. Fox a star; such success gives Goldberg a lot of credibility and power in the TV business. But didn't anyone remember Goldberg's two most recent shows, Day by Day (1988-89) and American Dreamer (1990-91), which came and went quickly? And didn't anyone remember that there were ominous precedents for this auteur thing-that, for example, after Larry Gelbart helped make M*A*S*H a brilliant television success, he came up with one of the most tedious, deeply personal bombs in TV history, 1980's United States? Brooklyn Bridge was, in short, beginning to smell like a self-indulgent stinker. It turns out, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. Brooklyn Bridge is beguiling, simultaneously the warmest and most intelligent new show of the season. It's also a vindication of artistic control in the TV industry. Brooklyn Bridge follows the ripe little life of 14-year-old Alan Silver (Danny Gerard). Alan lives with his younger brother, Nathaniel (Matthew Siegel), and his parents (Amy Aquino and Peter Friedman) in a small apartment in Bensonhurst; Alan's Russian-immigrant grandparents (Louis Zorich and Happy Days' Marion Ross) live in the apartment downstairs. The boys idolize both the Brooklyn Dodgers and turn-of-the-century labor organizer Eugene V. Debs; Alan pines for seemingly unattainable Irish Cath- olic girls while his imperious grandmother rolls her eyes in despair. As a portrait of a Jewish family of a bygone era, Bridge is comparable to Neil Simon's recent cycle of autobiographical plays (Brighton Beach Memoirs, Broadway Bound)-young Gerard, in fact, starred on Broadway in Simon's most recent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers. This sort of growing-up story has been told many times, but Goldberg doesn't allow his version to bog down in nostalgia. The dialogue is quick and peppery, filled with strong opinions and specific references, not just sitcom jokes. Ross' Sophie is a vivid creation-an overpowering grandmother who adores her grandsons but isn't above instilling them with a lot of guilt and her own prejudices. When she tries to pry Alan away from his beloved, red-haired Katie Monahan (Shannon's Deal's Jenny Lewis), she's not kidding-she really doesn't think a Jewish-Catholic romance is a good idea. It's clear that Goldberg wants us to think past the stereotype of the excessively doting Jewish grandmother, to see this woman as someone both wise and ignorant. Ross embodies this woman beautifully, using a soft Russian accent, twinkly eyes, and a sour, downturned mouth-you'll never think of her as Happy Days' ''Mrs. C'' again. To be sure, Brooklyn Bridge has its share of flaws. There are soft, mushy scenes, as when Alan instructs his little brother that ''death is a part of life,'' and moments when the stage-trained Gerard comes on too strong, looking and sounding like a runty Paul Sorvino. The elaborate theme song, written by Marvin Hamlisch and Alan and Marilyn Bergman and cooed by Art Garfunkel, contains all the treacle Goldberg manages to avoid in the rest of the show. But this is also the only sitcom on TV that makes education seem like a valuable, exciting prospect. Alan is the star of his class, but he's not a nerd. The characters in Bridge actually read books for pleasure; one of the best scenes in the pilot concerned Nathaniel's intense involvement in reading The Yearling. It is possible that Brooklyn Bridge will be a ratings failure-it's opposite ABC's can't-miss no-brainer Step by Step on Fridays. But on the level that matters most to its creator, Bridge is already a success: Goldberg has managed to turn a personal obsession into pop entertainment that everyone can enjoy. A-
Here's some articles on Brooklyn Bridge
( Time Magazine)The Way We (Maybe) Were
Monday, Sep. 30, 1991
By RICHARD ZOGLIN
The sound track serves up a luscious, Big-Band rendition of It's Been a Long, Long Time. On the screen, black-and-white photos dissolve one into another: soldiers coming home, couples embracing, homey shots from Main Street. "In the autumn of 1945," a female narrator intones, "America was invincible. The countertops at the soda fountain were still made of marble. Sodas cost a nickel. And Coke -- well, it only meant cola."
In a nostalgic mood yet? If the opening of ABC's Homefront doesn't get you, try CBS's Brooklyn Bridge, a fond look back at growing up in Brooklyn circa 1956. NBC's I'll Fly Away, meanwhile, paints a moodier watercolor of life in a Southern town in the late '50s, just as the civil rights movement was gathering steam. In a medium that is usually more comfortable with the here and now, the timely issue and the hip wisecrack, three of the most ambitious shows of the new season are harking back to the past.
Period pieces have never been a TV favorite. True, the western was once a network staple (and the genre has made a modest comeback recently, with such shows as Paradise and The Young Riders), and a small handful of hit series have been set in the past. But these shows were mainly interested in using the past for its symbolic or mythic value. The Minnesota frontier of Little House on the Prairie and the Depression-era South of The Waltons were essentially the same locale: an all-American Everyplace, where ethical issues and family dramas could be worked out against an idealized backdrop, far from the messy moral ambiguities of modern days.
In the new crop of nostalgia shows, by contrast, a particular period is re- created precisely and dwelt on lovingly. In a sense, these shows are about the past -- a past, moreover, that most viewers personally remember (or, thanks to the media, think they remember). And though none of these eras are portrayed as totally idyllic, they give off a warm, comforting glow. Their problems seem more manageable when viewed in hindsight. We know how everything came out.
The sudden popularity of prime-time nostalgia is hardly surprising. Oldies radio stations are thriving; TV tributes to Ed Sullivan and All in the Family drew blockbuster ratings last season; Natalie Cole hit the top of the charts by bringing back her father's old songs. For David Jacobs, an executive producer of Homefront, the current fascination with the past is reminiscent of fin-de-siecle Europe a hundred years ago. "The last decades of a century are always reflective," he says. But Jacobs and his fellow TV producers insist there is more involved. Says Gary David Goldberg, who has based Brooklyn Bridge on his own childhood: "If the show is an exercise in nostalgia, it will be a brief exercise. The truth of the family has to come out."
In fact, Goldberg's autobiographical series cuts closer to the bone than any of his previous sitcoms (which include most notably the long-running Family Ties). Bridge focuses on 14-year-old Alan (Danny Gerard) and his extended Jewish family, headed by a nosy, domineering grandmother (Marion Ross). Filmed with more attention to detail than most sitcoms (and with no studio audience), the show revels in '50s icons, from mah-jongg games to Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia to the inevitable rock-'n'-roll oldies on the sound track.
At its best, which is very good, Brooklyn Bridge rings with fresh and funny childhood observations. Alan's grandmother forces him to choose his dinner from frozen foods in the refrigerator even before he finishes breakfast. A school hood, taunting Alan and his friends in the rest room, demands to know if they are Jewish. "Not if you don't want us to be," one replies. Sentimentality gets the upper hand only in the show's "big" scenes: when Alan's nine-year-old brother (Matthew Siegel) meets his Dodger hero, Gil Hodges, or when Alan has to choose between a popular club and his dorky best friend. Grandma, the Robert Young of this series, is a bit too refined and understanding, and Alan is too much of an obvious winner. Leave it to a TV writer to remember himself as the cutest kid in class.
The memories are equally warm and fuzzy in Homefront. In this postwar soap opera set in a small Ohio town, mothers greet their returning soldier boys with "your favorite pie" and chide their kids with quaint cliches like, "You move as slow as molasses in January." Not that there isn't trouble in this paradise. One veteran comes home to a sweetheart who has fallen in love with his brother. There are stirrings of race and sex discrimination as well. A black veteran applies for work at the local factory but is told the only opening is for a janitor. A widowed mother is fired from her factory job to make room for the returning vets. Her boss's advice: "Find yourself a husband."
Homefront is a slick, satisfyingly busy soap opera, which suffers mainly by comparison with the show it has replaced on ABC's schedule: thirtysomething. Next to that complex and very contemporary drama, Homefront seems a throwback in more ways than one. The characters are drawn in primary colors and the confrontations hyped for melodramatic effect. This is the sort of TV drama where a girl puts on her wedding dress, races to the train station to greet her returning beau and meets -- who else? -- the war bride he has brought home but never told her about.
Where Homefront is loud and brassy, I'll Fly Away is quiet and relentlessly sober. Sam Waterston, with his somber mien and drooping shoulders, plays Forrest Bedford, a liberal-minded prosecutor in a small Southern town who is raising three children on his own. (His wife has been hospitalized after a nervous breakdown; Forrest, meanwhile, is growing friendly with a rival lawyer, played by Kathryn Harrold.) The family has just hired a new maid, Lily (Regina Taylor), who becomes the focus for an exploration of changing race relations at a crucial historical time.
The echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Member of the Wedding are hard to miss, and the show's two-hour pilot moves as slowly as, well, molasses in January. Yet producers Joshua Brand and John Falsey (St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure) have created a drama of rich texture, few tricks and much truth. The racial issues are sketched in deft, understated strokes, from the way Lily quietly eats her dinner separately from the family she has just served to her six-year-old charge's innocent questions after a bus ride ("How come me and you had to change our seats?").
I'll Fly Away rises above mere nostalgia, but it doesn't avoid romanticizing the past. The Bedford children are a bit too precocious in racial matters (15- year-old Nathaniel is bold enough to visit a black juke joint to listen to the music) and Lily too poetically noble. The town's first racial protest, moreover, is a sit-in that might have been a model for Gandhi. To protest the verdict in a case that Forrest has prosecuted, demonstrators gather slowly on the courthouse steps. They sit motionless, hushed, intense -- almost holy. The way it was? Or the way TV would prefer to remember it?
With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles
Television: Mr. Goodnet Stays the Course
Wall Street Journal; New York; Feb 24, 1992; Dorothy Rabinowitz
Since the ratings system usually decides which shows live and which die, it's worth taking notice when a network flouts the system and decides to keep a program alive despite meager ratings. It doesn't happen all that often. Neither does a show like Brooklyn Bridge come along often. And, to its great credit, CBS has backed Brooklyn Bridge wholeheartedly.
The network's feeling for the show, which is obvious if you happen to hear the way the net's executives talk about it, does in fact come down to a matter of the heart. To be more precise, it is about heart and mind vs. the numbers. However it all turns out, it is nice, once in a while, to catch a glimpse of real enthusiasm for product in the netherworld known as broadcasting. Especially when it is well justified, as it is in this case.
The show, which opened to unusually fervent critical acclaim, may not have found a wide audience yet, but it has found a passionate one. It is an audience that writes letters, many of which begin with lines like, "I'm a Middle American Wasp and I live for this program" or "I'm Catholic and this show means a lot to me."
Brooklyn Bridge, Gary David Goldberg's autobiographical series about the Silvers, a Jewish family in the 1950s, does in fact include a Catholic presence. Alan, the older of the two young Silvers, has fallen for the beautiful Katie Monahan, who attends parochial school and has a pack of girlfriends all named Mary.
The first time Katie Monahan's parochial school teacher and family were introduced, at the beginning of the series, it became clear something new and significant was afoot on prime time. Here are devout Catholics who have minds, who talk like regular people rather than fanatics; here a priest is something other than a caricature, neither a cute reprobate nor a mad enforcer. This is a far cry from the nastiness usually accorded pious Catholics and Catholicism on TV. As anyone who watches concentrated amounts of television, especially made-for-TV movies, can attest, a crucifix worn on the chest is an absolutely reliable signal from the writer that the bearer is a primitive.
Not that Brooklyn Bridge doesn't deal in what you might call religious differences; it revels in them. One of the master episodes of the season had Katie dragging her policeman father, no philo-Semite, to meet Alan's family. This daring, if fanciful, episode pitted Alan's grandmother Sophie, no devotee of mixing with Gentiles herself, against Officer Monahan in a Chinese restaurant. It could have been the soppiest of encounters, what with Sophie listening to mournful songs of the Holocaust, the policeman brooding over his Irish rebel anthems, and both families setting forth for the dinner encounter to the tunes—and the appropriate gang-war lyrics—from West Side Story.
But in a time acrawl with TV writers preening themselves on having dared new forms and breakthroughs, it's worth noting that this episode of Brooklyn Bridge stands as one of the rare instances of prime-time daring in which something was dared. For one thing, it was about something besides the celebration of its own daring.
The fine brew of hilarity, passion, sentimentality and slight craziness in this and most other episodes of the series of course owes almost everything to the writing and the cast. Peter Friedman brings a quiet stature to the character of the father, an unassuming post-office clerk who has time, when he comes off the night shift at 2 a.m., to listen to his wakeful youngest child, Nathaniel, babble about a book he is reading.
In a TV world teeming with beautiful little boys, Matthew Siegel's Nathaniel is the face it's impossible to tire of. But by now everyone in the cast has grown into his or her role, including the estimable Louis Zorich, who plays Grandpa, a man who does most of his talking with his eyebrows. As the boys' mother Amy Aquino is a force, though necessarily a drab presence compared with her mother, the regal Sophie.
Minor characters are the real measure of a work—a fact that always leaps to mind during the invariably terrific scenes involving Sid Elgart, the local candy-store owner. Who wouldn't recognize the surly pretensions, the eloquent grievances of this character as played by David Wohl? Then there are Alan Silver's neighborhood pals, Warren (Aeryk Egan) and the hapless Benny (Jake Jundef). It's hard to remember when last TV offered a cast of secondary characters so devotedly chiseled and detailed. There is, finally, of course, the character of Sophie, Marion Ross's Sophie, without whom, it's safe to say, Brooklyn Bridge could not have spanned the distances to so many hearts. So completely has Ms. Ross succeeded in turning herself into the dauntless, arrogantly principled, loving and seductive Sophie, immigrant Jewish grandmother, it seems a kind of mystery every time she opens her mouth, or washes a dish. It is an extraordinary achievement.
Golden Times Long Ago
Wall Street Journal; New York; Oct 21, 1991; Dorothy Rabinowitz
After the televised trial of Clarence Thomas it may be a while before people can work up much sense of shock about anything they see on the screen. After a morning of hearing lines like, "The FBI reports, you can see, contain no reference to Mr. Thomas's private parts" (Sen. Specter to Prof. Hill)—what's left that can still rock viewers? Nothing that's likely to appear on regular programming.
Who can worry, now, about the fact that this season, ABC's The Wonder Years apparently will pay homage to the new sexual realities by giving young Kevin —now a high school freshman—some experience. Some of the wonder, in short, is about to go out of The Wonder Years. It was only last year that a critic complained, somewhere, that the writers were spoiling the show's tone by advancing Kevin to a going-steady relationship with Winnie, the girl next door, instead of keeping him settled in an innocent and unrequited crush. Look where we are now.
Those who prefer boyish innocence to the steamy transports of adolescence still have, however, Brooklyn Bridge, the CBS counterpart to The Wonder Years. The young hero of Brooklyn Bridge, it's clear, isn't going to be catapulted into any major rite of passage any time soon, if ever (assuming CBS allows this splendid new series to survive). This isn't only because it takes place in the the mid-50s as opposed to The Wonder Years, which unfolds somewhere in the early '70s. Standards of behavior, to be sure, were different in the '50s than in the decades immediately following. Contrary, however, to the propaganda put about by celebrants and mythologizers of the '60s, sexual activity was not an invention of the Age of Aquarius. Even so, the most devout apostles of that age and its sexual revolution would not in their wildest dreams have imagined that the time would come when public schools would consider distributing condoms to students, as they are now planning to do in the New York City school system.
These aspects of the contemporary scene are precisely what has created the appetites for works dealing with older and better days. The echoes of the contemporary scene are also the cause, however, of the distinctly elegiac pall that shrouds The Wonder Years at every new hint of innocence about to be lost. Some of this is inevitable. Fred Savage, who plays Kevin, for one thing no longer has a young boy look.
For all that, the show seems not to have lost its writerly edge, as it showed in last week's affecting episode dealing with Kevin's unhappy lot as an employee. With all his friends off at the mall, and the call of the wild upon him, Kevin wanted to leave his job as clerk to a crabbed and aged hardware store owner. (The sad tale of an aged hardware store owner was also the theme of a recent movie of the week, starring George C. Scott. Perhaps this is the beginning of a trend in which retail hardware replaces insurance selling as the occupation scriptwriters most look down on -- their favorite symbol for the terrors of the mundane.)
Kevin is desperate to drop the job, but his employer clearly wants him to stay. The show's scripts have often displayed, as here, an interesting miasma of awareness—strongly laced with guilt—of the sorrows of age and the self-centered brutality of youth. These are scripts infused by a kind of remorseful recognition of youth's bounty—and of the hungers of age. This is clear in Kevin's every conversation with his gloomy father, his grandfather. In its somewhat heavy-hearted way, it is the theme that remains steadfast—and substantial—as all else about the show changes.
Matters are less heavy-hearted in Brooklyn Bridge, which evokes a life in which elders are happy just to dote on their young. One can only write scripts like this, evoking such a life, if one has lived it, as creator Gary David Goldberg seems to have done. It helps to have the convincing Peter Friedman in the role of the father. The sunny view of family life in Brooklyn Bridge isn't the sort that flattens drama, mainly because the sunniness here is complicated, as sunniness can sometimes be, and because it rings true. What rings less true, though it is in the end a matter of importance only to purists, are the Jewish accents. Letters complaining of the inauthenticity of these accents—letters of homicidal intensity—have come pouring in here, as they doubtless have to other critics who praised the opening program.
The complainants may have a point, if a minor one; once you have intimate acquaintance with this accent, it's impossible to accept hybrids. Clearly the main offender is Louis Zorich, who plays grandpa. Now it is true that there are many valid variants of the Yiddish accent, but none of them bears any recognizable resemblance to this grandpa's. At least Mr. Zorich's accent is recognizably of this earth, unlike Carol Kane's, in a visiting spot. On the other hand, Marion Ross, in the role of grandma, has managed to concoct a very reasonable combination "hoch" European flavored with a touch of Minsk—though this is a judgment with which many complainants bitterly disagree. Never mind. To watch the range of emotions that can play on this superb actress's face is to have no need of accents -- or of words at all.
Television: Stepping Back into Yesterday's America
Wall Street Journal; New York; Sep 23, 1991; Dorothy Rabinowitz
Something very interesting has hit television this season, if in a limited way. That something can only be described as the past—the subject of the season's two most ambitious new shows, Homefront and Brooklyn Bridge, which are set in 1945 and 1956 respectively. This can only mean that, out there in the land of the lost where new TV-series concepts are spawned, they have apparently stumbled on to the truth that in the America of today there is a large and unappeasable yearning for the America of yesterday.
In the strange and wonderful world of television, of course, setting a show in a time 45—years back doesn't mean that it won't come packaged with the full complement of '90s hot-button social issues, as, in fact, Homefront (ABC, Tuesdays, 10-11 p.m.) does. Homefront starts with the war's ending, the men coming home and "Its Been a Long, Long Time" blasting sweetly in the background. Add a montage of era snapshots, and, no doubt about it, Homefront begins on a dramatically promising note. That promise is only briefly kept, no doubt about that either, as melodramatic complications and characters begin multiplying at a fearsome and familiar rate.
After the evocative beginning and a brief nod to the large historic event that created this home front—namely the warthings move on briskly to the main business at hand, which mostly concerns broken hearts, lust, love, jealousy and a variety of similar ingredients woven into a series of soap operettas. This should not be altogether surprising, since the executive producer of Homefront, David Jacobs, also gave us Knots Landing. It also should not be surprising that Homefront, like Knots Landing, is polished stuff, as soaps go.
The show has, it should be said, a certain zest, deriving mainly from the period setting. But what is really most intriguing—and also frequently absurd—about Homefront is the uses to which the writers have put that setting. Into this 1945 drama the writers have injected most of the prime-time concerns of the '90s, chief among them the status of women. All that's missing in tomorrow's premiere (9:30-11 p.m. EDT, on ABC) is a reference to date rape.
Other aspects of the show's themes are similarly up-to-date and familiar. For example, the principal villains are a well-to-do manufacturer and his wife—selfish brutes of boundless amorality. The couple's Original Sin, it is clear, derives from the fact that the husband is a successful businessman of some wealth. In the wonderful world of TV, we know that no good is to be expected of people like this. Lest there be any doubt, the publicist's handout explains that this couple hates everybody—blacks, Jews, Italians, and so on. This is unnecessary to explain, since it goes without saying that any major villain created by our TV writers is bound to be deficient, above all, in multicultural sensitivity. By the end of the first show, however, the crafty businessman has been outwitted by his black servant, a man infinitely wiser and better than his employer. But that, of course, also goes without saying.
Brooklyn Bridge (Fridays, 8:30-9 p.m. EDT, on CBS) is a much higher order of retrospection. Gary David Goldberg (creator of Family Ties) looks back at the mid-'50s in Brooklyn with an eye that is truthful in the most important regards. He has written—as writers are for good reason taught they should—what he knows, and what he knows is the 14-year-old boy who is the main character, as well as that boy's friends and the things they think and talk about.
The choice of Danny Gerard for the role of Alan was a canny and fortunate piece of casting—the kind that can sometimes save a show. Alan is a modest and grave character, son of a postal worker and a regular kid who wears club jackets and yearns for girls. He also knows what he knows, and already has the slightly disputatious authority of a lifelong reader and believer in the printed word. A lot of viewers will recognize this boy because he existed—and still exists—and because young Mr. Gerard brings him to life with great skill.
Here, too, the producers begin the show with a montage of black-and-white snapshots to evoke a bygone era. But in this case, the opening is like the flick of a lash in the way those pictures recall the old neighborhoods as they were 35 years ago. The pictures tell of a Brooklyn that was and is no more, where people did not fear to walk out in the streets at night (much less in the day, as they fear to do in some parts of Brooklyn now).
The other star of the cast is Marion Ross, who portrays the boy's Jewish immigrant grandmother without too much nonsense, and even manages to inject a certain portly glamour into the role. The generally splendid script has its flaws, mainly its occasional tilt to mawkishness. For instance, it is not absolutely necessary to wring every last throb out of scenes like the one in which the grandmother and grandfather meet up with Gil Hodges, who then nobly supports Grandpa's lies about his skill at baseball.
Then there is the occasional moment when characters talk like people out of the '90s. The boy's mother burbles "I love you" as she goes off to work, instead of goodbye. In the '50s, "I love you" had not yet been transformed so as to mean "goodbye," "goodnight," "hello" and "how is your cold?" as it does today. It took our own era's propensity for cheapening language and its meaning to have come up with this particular atrocity. Such matters aside, Brooklyn Bridge is an enchanting look back that should win the hearts of huge numbers of viewers, including those who have never set foot in Mr. Goldberg's old borough.
An Article About reruns of Brooklyn Bridge airing on Bravo in 1994.
THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 22, 1994 TAG: 9408200073
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By Larry Bonko, Television Writer
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
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``BROOKLYN BRIDGE'' TO BE ON BRAVO
AND YOU THOUGHT you had seen the last of ``Brooklyn Bridge,'' the sentimental sitcom that was too good for network television. You haven't.
The largely autobiographical series from writer-producer Gary David Goldberg is back on the tube starting tonight.
And this time, the show will not be moved around like a token on a Monopoly board.
You can count on it.
``Brooklyn Bridge'' is to be telecast on Bravo Monday through Friday at 10 p.m. as part of the network's continuing series ``TV Too Good for TV.''
It follows ``Twin Peaks'' and ``Max Headroom,'' which certainly qualify as television too good for the networks.
All 35 episodes of ``Brooklyn Bridge'' will be seen without interruption on Bravo and in the order that Goldberg intended them to be seen.
Not only did CBS move the show around a lot - it had four different time slots - but the network brass also decided when certain episodes should be shown. On Bravo, Goldberg will have it his way.
``It's a very nice thing for us,'' Goldberg said about finding a home on Bravo, a channel that caters to the creative community in America and treats the visual arts with respect. Goldberg, speaking from Hollywood where he is producing a film, said that reviving ``Brooklyn Bridge'' for cable is not an impossible dream.
``The series is not yet dead,'' he said.
The problem in starting ``Brooklyn Bridge'' again would be reuniting the cast. Marion Ross, who won an Emmy nomination for her wonderful work as grandmother Sophie Goldberg, has commitments elsewhere. The youngsters in the original series, including Danny Gerard, are young no more. Gerard was 14 when the series began.
Revive ``Brooklyn Bridge'' with a new cast?
Maybe.
There are no ``lost'' episodes, said Goldberg.
CBS showed all 35 he produced. But chances are that because the series was moved so often - it never played for more than three weeks in the same time period - you missed one or more of the shows. Settle in to rediscover ``Brooklyn Bridge'' on Bravo.
It's the story of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn when the Dodgers were still playing baseball in that borough. Gerard as Alan brought Gary David Goldberg's youth to life. Alan lived under the same roof in Brooklyn with his parents and grandparents, and so did the series' creator.
``My dad worked in a post office. So did Alan's,'' said Goldberg.
Alan lost his heart to an Irish-Catholic girl. Goldberg married one.
His series is about penny candy, rooting for the Dodgers and sharing a milkshake (two straws) with your girlfriend. It is a warm, gentle, finely crafted show that came along when Congress was howling about too much violence on television. ``Brooklyn Bridge'' should have been embraced by viewers weary of violent images on TV in 1991, but it wasn't.
Perhaps it was too gentle, too fragile for the times, said Goldberg.
Dare I say it was too Jewish for middle America?
Not so, said Goldberg.
``I'd get mail from farmers in Iowa and people in the South and New England who said the family on `Brooklyn Bridge' was their family. They would say that Sophie was their grandmother. The people in the heartland identified with the series. Out audience consisted of 7 to 8 million people who were alienated from traditional network television and wanted something better.''
Trouble is, not enough of us really want something better.
If we did, ``Brooklyn Bridge,'' ``I'll Fly Away,'' ``Homefront'' and ``The Class of '96'' would still be in production. Instead, we have ``Married. . . With Children.'' Thank heaven for cable.
``Brooklyn Bridge'' is back, and that's something to rejoice about.
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